UC Berkeley Building Up Bloch

There are a lot of composer anniversaries out there, and the lesser ones tend to be ignored. In 2009, the 50th anniversary of Ernest Bloch's death took a back seat to other commemorations, and the UC Berkeley Symphony is doing its part to take up the slack.

Even if you're an experienced concertgoer you may not have heard much by Bloch beyond Schelomo, his famous “Rhapsody on Hebraic Themes” for cello and orchestra. In the Bay Area, you've had a couple of opportunities to hear his impressive Sacred Service. But Bloch, who taught composition at Berkeley from 1939 to 1951 and left a large collection of letters and scores to the music library there, has a lot more to offer than that. The University Symphony Orchestra this weekend offers the Suite Hebraique (1951), with Nils Bultmann as viola soloist, and the Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1925) for strings and piano. Although primarily associated in popular imagination with his Jewish-themed works, the Concerto Grosso shows another side of the composer, framed as it is by a Prelude and Fugue in Bloch's Romantic idiom.

By way of prelude, the University Symphony offers a large work that had its premiere 101 years ago — Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 in E Minor.